


hold the night

by vvelna



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War II, Closeted Relationship, Established Relationship, M/M, Minor Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 11:32:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17099804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vvelna/pseuds/vvelna
Summary: It's late 1940, and Dan and Phil are living in London during the Blitz.





	hold the night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phansb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phansb/gifts).



> kyaipn, i hope you enjoy this! i've never written a historical au before, so thank you for inspiring me to Try New Things.*
> 
> and of course, huge thanks to my beta, Leah. thank you for all your reassurance and good advice, and for dealing with my whining and occasionally ridiculous worries about word choices. ty ly bb** :^)
> 
>  
> 
> *Copyright Phil Lester, 2018  
> **beta buddy

Phil crept slowly through the dark flat, one foot sweeping the floor in front of him and a hand outstretched to meet any obstacles. In his other hand he held a glass of water. He could have lit a candle or grabbed a torch. The blackout curtains were down and that small bit of light wouldn’t have escaped. But the idea of being caught violating the blackout by an Air Raid Precautions warden made him anxious. He hated getting in trouble.  
  
His leg was sore that day, making what was usually a nearly imperceptible limp—the consequence of a broken bone that had never healed properly—more pronounced. He should’ve just stayed in bed. But his mouth was dry, and once he started thinking about fetching a glass of cold water, he couldn’t rest.   
  
The flat was only one room, with a sheet hung from the ceiling to cordon off the area where he and Dan slept on a mattress on the floor. Phil knew where each piece of furniture was located, and since the blackout rules went into effect, he’d become more adept at moving about in the dark. He had made it to the little kitchen sink without incident.

Minutes earlier he’d been lying on his back, ruminating on anecdotes about Dan’s coworkers from before the war. They had called Phil an “odd fellow” after meeting him a few times, and later on, when Dan had told them they were going to rent together to cut costs, had asked if he was at all concerned about sharing quarters with a homosexual. Dan had told him that as they sat across from each other eating breakfast in their shared flat for the first time. Like it was just a funny, eye-roll-inducing story.  
  
“What did you say?” Phil had asked, trying to feign simple curiosity.  
  
“I told them you’re a good man,” Dan replied, eyes on the toast he was buttering, “and they shouldn’t speak as if they know you.”  
  
“A good man. So not a homosexual.”  
  
Dan put the toast and knife down on his plate. He sighed and rubbed his temples.  
  
In that moment Phil had felt like a cross child. What did he expect Dan to say? His response was well-measured and vague enough to let his coworkers extract whatever meaning they liked from it. Somehow that was never enough for Phil. He’d let the conversation die, made them both more tea, and kissed Dan as he set a full cup in front of him.  
  
Phil often found himself preoccupied by memories of those tense moments when he was alone. They came slithering into his mind uninvited—always when he hadn’t seen Dan all day, hadn’t spoken with him, didn’t know what he was thinking. It was too easy to forget the way Dan looked at him and held him, and the reassuring things he said, when he was gone and insecurity filled the empty space he left behind. Phil chastised himself for dwelling on things that didn’t matter. He and Dan were happy together. So unbelievably, almost overwhelmingly happy. Happier than Phil had ever imagined he could be with another person.  
  
That night Dan was out volunteering for the ARP services. When the air raid started, he’d ride in the back of an ambulance from bomb site to bomb site. He would help the driver load people into the vehicle and tend to them on the way to first aid posts and hospitals throughout the city. Whenever Phil heard a boom on the nights Dan volunteered, he wondered how close Dan was to where the bomb had dropped. Maybe it had caught him off guard, or maybe he was on his way toward it. He might be a victim or a savior; Phil had no way of knowing.   
  
Phil was glad that his leg and Dan’s day job as an electrician, helping to keep power running where it was most needed throughout the city, had kept both of them from conscription. If they died, they’d die in the same city where they lived and loved. Phil couldn’t really get his head around the idea of only one of them dying. It didn’t make sense. Even if they didn’t die at the exact same second, one would naturally follow the other. No matter how many kilometers were between them in London at any given moment, they were surely too close for one of them to escape a blow dealt to the other.  
  
Dan would be alright. He always was. He’d come home in the morning smelling of ash, limbs wobbly as gelatin as he stripped off his clothes and fell into bed beside Phil. He would burrow forward until he was as far into Phil’s arms as possible, stopped only by the solid wall of his chest.  
  
All it took was one night though, Phil knew. One fire too strong, one pile of rubble too unsteady, one bomb dropped too close.  
  
Phil stood still, lost in thought. Dan often called him out on his tendency to let his mind wander. He’d snap his fingers and say, “Phil? Are you home?” but just then Phil was alone in a perfectly dark, quiet void—the ideal environment for spacing out.   
  
The opening wail of the air raid siren caught Phil off guard. He should have been used to it by then, after weeks of the same, but he was distracted from his usual state of tense anticipation. He jumped and his bad leg twisted at the ankle and gave way. The glass slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor. He fell face-first toward the wreckage, in a dramatic way that surely few people were capable of.  
  
Phil managed to get himself into a seated position. Water dripped from his chin and he felt the sharp sting of glass piercing his cheeks. He was unsure if he should feel for the shards and pull them out—despite not being able to see—or get up and find a light and a mirror. He didn’t know how much glass surrounded him, and if any was waiting to find its way into his palms or the soles of his feet.  
  
So he just sat, immobilized by indecision. The rise and fall of the air raid siren finally faded out, and he heard footsteps on creaky floorboards.  
  
Someone was in the flat. Moving toward him. Phil’s heart started to race. Somehow the idea of a stranger coming into his home was scarier than the prospect of a bomb dropping on it. It was a more intimate danger. He held his breath and prayed he wouldn’t be seen.  
  
He yelped as a small light suddenly intruded on the darkness.  
  
“Phil?”  
  
It was Dan, holding a torch pointed at the floor. He raised it slightly to illuminate Phil’s face. Phil sighed with relief and pressed a hand to his chest as if to comfort his still pounding heart.  
  
“Why aren’t you at fucking Aldwych?” Dan snapped.  
  
Phil didn’t let Dan’s harsh tone get to him. He knew that when Dan was worried his concern often came across as anger.  
  
It had become customary for Phil, in the late afternoon after work, to join the queue outside the tube station, which now served as a public bomb shelter. But that night his leg was sore and his spirits were low. Sitting in a crowd of strangers, while Dan was out there above ground and in danger, always made him painfully restless. Phil could never sleep like some of the others did. He longed to pace about, as anxious energy built inside him. He just couldn’t take it that night.  
  
Fragments of glass crunched under the soles of Dan’s shoes as he approached. He looked down, shining the beam of the torch on them, then back up to Phil’s face. He brushed some glass out of the way with the toe of his boot and knelt down in front of Phil.  
  
“What did you do?” His tone was almost accusatory, as if Phil had thrown a tantrum and made a mess. But Phil could sense the concern behind the mask of annoyance.  
  
“I fell and broke a glass.”  
  
“You buffoon. God, Phil, what’d you do—smash it with your face?”  
  
“More or less.”  
  
Dan passed him the torch.  
  
“Hold this. I’m going to fetch the old first aid kit before you bleed out.”  
  
Dan moved through the flat with the ease of a cat in the dark. He returned carrying a tin box and a lit candle in a saucer, both of which he placed on the floor before sitting with his legs crossed in front of Phil.  
  
“Alright, time for Doctor Dan to fix you up.”  
  
Phil giggled and then gasped when the movement shifted some of the pieces of glass piercing his skin.  
  
Dan reached out and held his face by the chin with one hand, surveying the damage.  
  
“You’re lucky nothing went in your eye. Where are your glasses?”  
  
“By the bed. Thought I’d rest a bit before the siren started. I only got up because I was thirsty.”

He pouted at Dan, imploring him to show sympathy for his plight. Dan made a sound somewhere between an exasperated groan and a fond giggle.  
  
He cleaned up the shallow nicks on Phil’s face, then began extracting the bits of embedded glass with tweezers. His face was set in hard lines and his hands were steady. He cleaned each cut with iodine and pressed a clean bit of gauze on top, taping it in place. Phil winced through the sting and spoke to keep his mind off it.  
  
“Why are you here?”  
  
“I just had a feeling I needed to stop by. Wasn’t planning on staying. Carol’s going to kill me tomorrow. Stop moving your face.”  
  
Carol was the driver Dan worked with. According to Dan, she “drove like a madman,” but she always got them from place to place in one piece.  
  
“What will you tell her and the others? That you didn’t show up because you were here taking care of me?”  
  
Dan’s hands stilled and his shoulders tensed.   
  
“Do we have to have this conversation right now, while I’m pulling glass out of your face?” he asked tersely.  
  
“What conversation?” Phil bit his lip. He had a feeling he should stop talking, but he couldn’t help himself.  
  
“The one where you get mad at me because I won’t go around telling everyone we’re lovers or whatever you like.”  
  
“That’s…not what I meant. I’m not mad.”  
  
Phil wasn’t mad. But Dan’s words brought back the ache in his chest from earlier—a hungry yearning to hold hands with Dan in the street, to kiss him on the cheek, to say _my husband_. An impossible dream. He was sad. Perhaps it was selfish to be caught up in those feelings in the middle of a war, while thousands throughout the city were dying every night. Or maybe the ever-present specter of death and destruction was what intensified them. They might die without anyone ever knowing how much he loved Dan and how much Dan loved him. Such a good thing blown to pieces, buried in rubble.  
  
He wished he could just let it go.

"Doesn’t it ever bother you? The way it bothers me?" he asked.

Dan cut a piece of gauze to cover the last cuts on Phil’s face. He didn’t look up, but after a moment’s hesitation, he began to whisper fiercely. It was a subdued anger, like if he raised his voice he’d lose control of it.

"Of course it does...I _hate_ it. I hate the way people try to set me up on dates with 'nice girls.' I hate how people ask me when I'm getting married. Even with a bloody war on. People want to know my plans for settling down and starting a family when it's all over. If it ever ends."

He cupped Phil’s chin to tilt his face into the optimal position for applying the gauze. He laid the soft white square over skin dyed orange by iodine.

"But I have you. No matter what I say—or can’t say—to anyone. I know the truth.”

Phil had expected Dan to evade the question, as usual. He heard Dan’s words, but he couldn’t quite process them. Not yet. They buzzed in his brain. They’d sink in later, and he’d call upon them the next time he was drowning in doubt. When he needed them.

Dan smoothed down the last bit of tape. “There. Not my best work, but we haven’t got the finest materials at our disposal here.”  
  
Phil reached up and felt his face. The squares of gauze formed strange and lumpy islands. It was somewhat clumsy work, especially for someone who helped patch people up in the back of an ambulance. Dan must have been more upset then Phil realized, his hands not working as deftly as they could.  
  
“Stay put,” Dan commanded. “Let me sweep up the rest of the glass before you get up.”  
  
Phil’s throat tightened and he fought to hold back unexpected tears. Dan could be abrasive and moody. He was sometimes dismissive of Phil’s feelings when he didn’t want to deal with them. But he was also gentle and kind. He took care of Phil. Even now, when he was worn ragged by nonstop work.  
  
Phil lit up the glass on the floor with the torch while Dan swept it up. When Dan returned from dumping it in the bin, he pulled Phil up by both hands. He bent over again to scoop up the candle, and Phil grabbed the torch and switched it off.  
  
“I’m tired. Can we go to bed?” Dan said, his voice trailing into a yawn.  
  
Phil nodded, though he wasn’t sure if Dan could see him. He was afraid his voice would crack if he spoke, and right then what they both needed was sleep. Phil snaked an arm around Dan’s waist and Dan laid his head on Phil’s shoulder. He pulled back the sheet around the bedroom.  
  
They stripped off their clothes, crawled into bed, and shifted around on the thin mattress—limbs overlapping and intertwining until they found a position that was comfortable enough for both of them. Dan’s head was pressed below Phil’s jaw, curly hair tickling his neck. Phil wrapped his arms around Dan’s back and held him tightly. They were adrift in a sea of darkness. Dan fell asleep quickly, succumbing to pure exhaustion. Phil lay awake for some time.

There might be no tomorrow. The idea terrified Phil when he let himself focus on it. He tried to ground himself in the moment. Right then, he had the heat of Dan’s body, the fragile illusion of safety in the home they shared, and the certainty of their love despite the uncertainty of everything else.  
  
He drifted off and they both managed to sleep through the all clear siren.


End file.
